Industry Veteran John Byrne Replaces Emilio Ghilardi at AMD

Recently, AMD announced the departure of Emilio Ghilardi as the Chief Sales Officer and in fact, it was a good move. According to current and former AMD insiders, Emilio was spending most of his time behind a desk, instead of earning miles like Tom Stuker and visiting customers worldwide.

Instead, the role of executive that meets the clients and continuously reacts to the market trends and opportunities fell to local executives, such as John Bryne for operations in the Americas Mega Region (North and South America).Rory Read, the newly appointed CEO of AMD was one of key factors to reshape the sales operation and named John Byrne as the new "Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Accounts". John will report directly to Rory, who is still serving as the Acting Chief Sales Officer.

The newly formed Global Accounts group is addressing the needs and "exceeding the expectations of AMD’s largest multinational partners." – read, Lenovo, HP, Dell, Acer from one side, and government, oil, aerospace and other clients from the other. This is the area where AMD has traditionally been on the back foot compared to Intel, NVIDIA and similar players.

Needless to say, we’re very glad that AMD is appointing the right people for the right job in terms of supporting sales teams. We’re still concerned with what is going on with the engineering department, where there are practically no futurists left after massive departures (Raja Koduri and Bob Drebin – Apple, Rick Bergman – CEO Synaptics, Carrell Killebrew – unknown, Eric Demers – Qualcomm?).

When it comes to appointing John to this new position, AMD’s CEO stated that "John has consistently demonstrated an ability to help customers win in the marketplace and understands that when our customers win, AMD wins. In his new position, John will have greater responsibility and ability to drive this understanding across our entire sales force by building deeper relationships with our multinational partners and ensuring we deliver on our commitments."

In any case, we wish John all the best in his role. Should he succeed in what we believe to be a temporary position, the next step should be Rory’s relinquishing of the "Acting Chief Sales Officer" role and passing it down to John.

About the AuthorTheo Valich

Focused on creating synergy between various industries, creating next-gen solutions.Passionate about the new and emerging technologies. Work experience spans from game development and event organizing, editing magazine and on-line publications to aerospace development.Specialties: Team Leadership / Management / Technical Consultant / Funding.Enjoys travelling around the world and meeting new people. :)